One Down, Multitudes To Go
"[Abdeslam's ability to elude law enforcement while remaining in Brussels equates to a network of supporters and accomplices]. That is what we will have to examine."
"There are examples in history when we have taken much more time to track a suspect down. He has been identified in several other places in Europe. Was it true or not? We didn’t know. We will have to look at what led him here, if he accepts to speak out."
"We found heavy weaponry in Forest during the first search. There will probably be other people to track down. The threat we are confronted to (sic) is similar to the November Paris attacks. It’s often several teams with heavy weaponry."
Belgian Foreign Affairs Minister Didier Reynders
"We are aware that if this arrest is an important step, it is not the definitive conclusion. We know that the network was very large in France, Belgium, and in other European countries."It has taken four months of intensive searching, but the 26-year-old credited with masterminding the November 13 coordinated Paris attacks that killed 130 people has been brought to a conclusion, albeit not a final one. The search continues for other suspects. And once they have been rounded up, if not shot outright as occurred in an earlier raid with an Abdeslam accomplice Mohamed Belkaid, intelligence will look further in hopes of discovering the identities of sympathizers and enablers.
"I know the Belgian authorities will respond quickly and favorably to our request for extradition."
French President François Hollande
"To be able to arrest him is quite an amazing feat. But whereas the other attackers blew themselves up in the past, this is the guy who refused to die in the attack and fled in his car while the others did [die]. It looks like he doesn't want to die."
Former Belgian special forces soldier
"There is nothing new about Mollenbeek being a place with terrorism problems, it has been like that since the 1990s."
"But nowadays it is easier to catch people hiding in these places because of the advances in technology, social media and such, which may have had a role in tracking him down in this case."
Jean Louis Bruguiere, former Belgian anti-terror judge
They will have to look deep and with the kind of thorough determination that will indeed require intense scrutiny of social media 'and such', since interrogating the residents of Mollenbeek is not likely to disclose the kind of information being sought. Like the immigrant-dense Muslim banlieues of Paris whose sinister interiors are closed to French police, Belgium's are a mirror image of second-generation immigrant-citizens seething with resentment against the countries that gave them haven.
The malaise that has overtaken Europe with the infiltration of fundamentalist Islamism and all the grudging resentment of those who consider themselves to be victims of racist and religious suspicion that imprisons them in a socially-politicized ghetto of alienation and disaffection has created the perfect storm of a demographic that cares nothing for the stability and laws of the country they inhabit. A storm whose occasional claps of thunder result in violent protests serving to fuel rage.
Residents of Mollenbeek will not feel better disposed toward the state they have citizenship in having experienced the tense search for one of their own conducted by helmeted police with riot shields. The capture of Salah Abdeslam and the imminent capture of Mohamed Abrini and Soufiane Kayal will, if anything, stiffen the resolve of the jihadists among the Muslim ghettoes of Europe to 'defend' themselves against the 'Islamophobic' assaults of their hosts.
Labels: Belgium, Europe, France, Immigration, Jihad, Muslims
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, March 19, 2016
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